Leading a team of four state inspectors, a state housing official said he is going “top to bottom” through 400 public housing units in the Snug Harbor section of Germantown – already deemed by the state to be the worst of the 938 state-funded housing units in Quincy.

Chris Burrell The Patriot Ledger @Burrell_Ledger

QUINCY – Conditions in one public housing unit inspected this week by state housing officials are so unsafe that the three residents of the apartment are being relocated, said James Marathias, the director of facilities maintenance for the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

Leading a team of four state inspectors, Marathias said he is going “top to bottom” through 400 public housing units in the Snug Harbor section of Germantown – already deemed by the state to be the worst of the 938 state-funded housing units in Quincy.

“The things that I have seen are extremely concerning, and physical conditions are very bad,” Marathias told commissioners of the Quincy Housing Authority at a board meeting Wednesday afternoon. “DHCD remains very concerned with findings at Quincy Housing Authority.”

The full-bore response by state housing officials comes one month after inspectors uncovered dozens of health and safety violations in homes managed by the Quincy Housing Authority and issued a scathing report with orders to fix the most serious problems.

The housing authority failed to meet last Friday’s deadline to correct those violations, which triggered across-the-board inspections by Marathias and his team.

Over the last six days, state officials have documented conditions that James Lydon, executive director of the Quincy Housing Authority, described as “disgraceful” – sewage from an upstairs toilet leaking onto a stove, holes in floors and exposed live electrical wires.

State officials targeted Quincy earlier this spring after hearing about maintenance problems here. Inspectors spent three days in March and April going through nearly 100 apartments where they found heavy mold, exposed electrical wiring, broken lights, leaking pipes and missing smoke detectors in multiple apartments and common areas, according to an eight-page report submitted in mid-May.

On Wednesday, Marathias laid some of the blame for the mess on the Quincy Housing Authority’s practice of hiring an outside firm to conduct annual inspections of homes but never sending Quincy housing officials to participate in those inspections.

The result was that critical health and safety problems were not flagged, said Marathias, whose team found many discrepancies in the report issued by the firm that the Quincy housing agency hired.

“Proper procedures were not followed by allowing outside company to do the inspections,” he said. “Life and safety items were not documented.”

After Marathias’ presentation to the commission, Lydon said the housing authority would abandon that practice and conduct future inspections with its own staff. In this fiscal year, the Quincy Housing Authority paid a Tennessee-based company, McCright and Associates, just under $14,000 to inspect its housing units.

“We have inspectors not doing an appropriate job,” said Lydon. “Neither firm has been documenting what they should be documenting … and enforcement issues are being overlooked.”

Lydon also welcomed the assistance of the state housing department.

“We’re really happy DHCD is involved here,” he said. “They are going to help us take a number of giant steps forward.”

Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch attended the commission meeting and backed the efforts of Lydon, who was hired last summer to lead the housing authority.

“We have a challenge today, and Mr. Lydon is up to that challenge,” said Koch, while stressing that the housing authority is not a part of the city government but an independent agency.

“These things didn’t happen overnight,” Koch said of the many problems highlighted by the state in recent weeks. “These things have been festering quite a while.”

Chris Burrell may be reached at cburrell@ledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @Burrell_Ledger.

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